The Bay Game: A simulation of the Chesapeake's health

Virtual stakeholdersLyndsey Funkhouser '12 (left) and Caitlin Broznak '11 participate in the Bay Game, a computer-based simulation of the pressures and challenges of maintaining the environmental health of the Chesapeake Bay. Based at the University of Virginia, the latest running of the Bay Game included participants from seven Virginia schools.
Photo by Courtney Wickel

How would the health of the
Chesapeake Bay hold up if the watershed were managed by students?

Students in William &
Mary’s Watershed Dynamics class convened in the basement of Tyler and assumed
the virtual roles of stakeholders —land developers, farmers, watermen, and
local regulators—to simulate the challenges inherent in Chesapeake Bay
management.

William & Mary was one of
seven Virginia universities participating in the University of Virginia’s Bay
Game. The UVA Bay Game is a computer simulation designed to provide players
with feedback on how their decisions as role-players influence the economy, the
environment and the quality of life in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. During
each round of the game, individual players make decisions: Farmers decide
whether to cultivate their crops sustainably or not. Developers decide where
they want to build. Watermen decide how often they crab. All the while, regulators
are incentivizing and limiting the kinds of actions that can be taken.

Randy Chambers, professor of biology
and director of the Keck Environmental Field Lab, believes that the game raises
the right kinds of questions.

“As role-players, you have to make
decisions. You obviously want to make money, and you obviously want to protect
the environment,” Chambers said. “How do you trade off those different things
in the context of a Bay with declining water quality?”

“You definitely have to strike
a balance,” explains Megan Kobiela, a biology graduate student at William &
Mary who was involved with an earlier version of the Bay game as an
undergraduate student at UVA. “You also have to pay attention to what you’re
doing. You might lose money in the short term farming sustainably, but, if the
policy makers change their incentive regime, you might end up better in the end.”

Decisions are input to a server
in Charlottesville where 52,000 equations are run simultaneously to project how
water quality is affected with each round of game play. Unlike the real world,
players are provided with instantaneous feedback on how their decisions have
affected a variety of factors, including crop prices, urban sprawl and bay
health. Players can see how their actions have affected the Bay area before
making subsequent decisions.

Lyndsey Funkhouser ’12, played
a crop farmer and wrestled with the very realistic problem of how to balance
her desire to be environmentally friendly with her need to keep her farm in
operation. “I realized the effect of supply and demand, as well as taxes and
incentives, has on whether or not individuals will attempt to farm sustainably”
says Funkhouser. “It isn't an issue of the personal desire to help the Bay, it’s
an issue of the personal means to be able to do it.”

Perhaps the most compelling
part of the game occurred as players and regulators struggled to compromise conflicting
interests. “There is some really neat interplay between groups that happen, and
you get to see how they happen with every round of the game,” comments
Chambers.

“The game opened my eyes to how complex it is
and how many stakeholders are involved. It’s not just as easy as ‘Okay, you
can’t allow any more fertilizer into the Bay,’ because that really impacts the
other people’s livelihoods,” Kobiela said.

Ultimately, the UVA Bay Game
emphasizes the interdependency among the various stakeholders. As Chambers says,
“Either we’re all gonna win or we’re all gonna lose.”